Enterprises (e.g., corporations, partnerships, governments, academic institutions, other organizations, etc.) face continuously increasing risks of malicious attacks waged against their computer networks and assets. The magnitude and complexity of the situation is further increased by the current trend towards BYOD—bring your own device. BYOD environments allow enterprise employees to use their own devices for work purposes, such as, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, or other electronic devices, in addition to the computer resources provided by the enterprise. However, BYOD scenarios pose inherent security risks because the enterprise typically lacks uniform and full control over each employee-provided device.
Some enterprises have mitigated the risks described above by deploying and maintaining secure networks that limit access to and from outside of the network (e.g., the Internet), as well as, by using virtualized environments that allow enterprise employees to access non-secure resources from within the secure network in a manner that does not impose a risk on the secure network. Techniques for instantiating an application in a virtualized environment are well known in the art. Such an application may be instantiated on a virtualization server and a counterpart remote application may be rendered on a user's computing device.
A common use of application virtualization is to publish hosted web browser applications. An enterprise may have several motives for publishing hosted web browser applications. Among them, an enterprise may publish a web browser to provide enterprise users with access to websites that would otherwise be inaccessible from within the secure network (e.g., websites that may necessitate Internet access) or websites that have been identified as non-work related or would otherwise pose a security risk to the secure network. For example, a marketing employee may need to access a social media web application for work purposes rather than personal purposes. In another scenario, an enterprise may have implemented a policy to utilize a specific type and version of a web browser application, but one or more employees may need to access a website that is incompatible with the enterprise's approved web browser application. Rather than risk security issues by allowing employees to install an unapproved web browser application, the enterprise may publish hosted web browsers that comprise a type and version that is compatible with the website. For example, an enterprise may have a policy for employees to use the Internet Explorer® web browser application, manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., yet the application might not be capable of displaying the content of a webpage that is compatible with a CHROME web browser application, manufactured by the Google Corporation of Mountain View, Calif.
However, the user experience of using a hosted web browser may consist of using a different uniform record locator (URL) than the URL of the web application itself. These URL differences may be problematic for users. For example, if a user is working remotely, the user might not be able to open a URL to an internal website (e.g., by clicking on a link) from a machine outside a secure network. In another example, if a user is working from a machine on a secure network (e.g., a corporate network), the user might not be able to access an external website URL. Thus, the user may be prevented from secure web access in order to access various hosted web applications.